EXASPERATIONS

Margaret Anderson

Carl Van Vechten has an article about Mary Garden in The Bellman which he prefaces with the aesthetic discovery that in her art Mary Garden leaves nothing to accident. Oh subtle critical mind!... Mr. Van Vechten should write art notes for The New York Times,—which I believe he has done. I remember once, in a discussion on music, I asked him furiously whether he knew anything about the subject, only to learn that he had been a Times music critic for years—which is quite as it should be.

I understand that The Seven Arts is about to suspend publication because of the withdrawal of its chief patron, Mrs. Rankine, on account of an irreconcilable disagreement between her and the editorial body concerning a war policy. There are intelligent people, I hear, who are prepared to defend her action. But there is no conceivably intelligent defense for such an action. It is simply another case of the proverbial and astounding American “nerve”. In the case of a magazine of the Arts it is a truly colossal nerve. How dare Mrs. Rankine or any other patron take the responsibility of the several thousand readers who subscribed to The Seven Arts because they wished to read what its editors had to say? Whether they agreed or not with what was said has nothing to do with it. It is even conceivable that some of them may have enjoyed reading what they did not agree with, or that some of them (ghastly but possible) approved of the Seven Arts attitude toward the war. Only one thing is certain: that none of those subscribers read the magazine because of anything Mrs. Rankine contributed to its pages.

But a certain type of American mind is capable of anything. This moral nation is now facing the issue of prohibition. If the prohibitionists are successful great vineyards in California will be burned. To burn a vineyard!—is it conceivable? A vineyard is a beautiful thing....

For months, everywhere I have looked for life I have found death—except in two cases: once in the instance of death itself, and once in the spectacle of an old woman.

The first was an “absurd and unmerited exile,” impossible to bear; and it gave me forever, though I could not be there, the picture of a woman with a high thin nose lying in a coffin,—part of that beauty which alone is indestructible. The second was Sarah Bernhardt in an act of Camille,—a thing immortal beyond any words that I can find.